Thursday, May 18, 2017

Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard published novels for parts of
seven decades (1953-2012) and more than twenty of his books were made into
theatrical or television movies.Leonard
began his career writing westerns but turned to crime fiction, the genre for
which he is best known today, in the 1960s.By the time Pagan Babies was
published in 2000, Leonard (who died in 2013 at age 87) had begun to slow his
pace considerably but did later have great success with work that was turned
into the television series Justified.

Pagan Babies exhibits many
of the traits that Elmore Leonard fans have come to love over the author’s long
career. It is filled with long, quirky conversations that do as much to develop
the novel’s characters – and even the plot – as anything else Leonard has to
say about them.As is usually the case
with Leonard, the plot moves along quickly but is subject to veering to the
left or right at short notice because of the sheer ineptness of some of the
novel’s characters.Elmore Leonard never
seemed to have a very high opinion of the average intelligence of the criminal
population, and it shows again in Pagan
Babies.

For reasons best kept to himself, Father Terry Dunn decides to leave
his Rwanda church and return to his hometown of Detroit.That he witnessed the massacre by machete of
forty-seven church members during his last Mass, and that the bodies are still
inside the church weeks later, does have more than a little to do with his
decision, but it does not tell the whole story.Now, despite having left Detroit five years earlier under a tax-fraud
indictment, Father Dunn is willing to take his chances there.So armed with scores of pictures of Rwandan
orphans and mutilated bodies, he comes home hoping to dodge the tax-fraud indictment
and raise a little money for the orphans.

Elmore Leonard

But is Terry Dunn really a priest?He certainly doesn’t convince the two main women in his life at the
moment, his sister-in-law and Debbie Dewey, a woman who sometimes works for his
brother.In Terry Dunn, Debbie Dewey
(who has just completed a three-year sentence for aggravated assault) sees a
kindred spirit.And she may just be
right because Terry seems to feel the same way about her.So when Debbie explains her plan to recover
the $67,000 her ex-boyfriend stole from her, the pair joins forces in a
complicated scheme they hope will net each of them considerably more than that
amount.

Remember, though, that this
is an Elmore Leonard novel and soon enough a whole cast of dimwits is going to
appear just in time to gum up the works, including Mutt, perhaps the dumbest
hit-man in the history of crime fiction (and my favorite character in the
book).

Pagan Babies may not quite
be Elmore Leonard in his prime, but it is still a damn fine crime novel.Take a look.

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